If you follow me on Twitter, FriendFeed, or Ma.gnolia chances are you have seen references to a service called Mento.
Mento is a relatively new service that is designed to make sharing bookmarks easier. The goal is to take the process of both sharing and saving a bookmark, and reduce it to as few clicks as is needed to get the job done. Mento does this very well.
Mento is accessed either through a browser extension (for IE or Firefox) or through a standard bookmarklet. When you want to share a site, you click on either the extension button or on your bookmarklet, and are presented with a window where you can save, share, tag, and describe the page you are viewing.
The Mento web page includes a list of everything you have saved or shared. It makes it VERY easy to go back and share something again. The search on Mento is surprisingly fast and accurate. You get loads of great information about your bookmarks as well. For each item that you shared you can see the date the item was shared, the tags and description you assigned, the source website, the referring website if you had one. Take a look at the following screenshot to see what I mean.
When it comes to sharing, Mento really starts to shine. First, Mento makes it really easy to just e-mail a link to people. Mento has a contact list feature which puts addresses at your finger tips and makes things very easy. Mento also includes direct links to FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter and Ma.gnolia. You link your accounts and Mento does the work of depositing the link in those services. FriendFeed and Ma.gnolia happen without any work on your part. If you want to send to Twitter, you add Twitter to the address bar like you would when sending an e-mail.
Mento has some other nice features as well, like the ability to Reply to others that have already shared a page. Maybe the best extra feature though is the ability to either include a picture from the page you are sharing, or better still actually take a small screenshot from the page and share that. The screenshot feature is listed as experimental, but really does work flawlessly.
Overall, I would give Mento three thumbs up if I had them. I have pretty much replaced my other sharing bookmarklets with Mento and will continue to for quite some time.
The service is still in it’s beta stage, and an invite is required to join the service. I do have a few invites to share with friends, and access to the beta can be requested on the site.
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